Southern Utah's Crazy, Adventure Rides

When you feel the elemental urge to connect two points on a map, you're required to respond--even if you didn't expect the fauxhawk, the firecrackers, the Old Chub or the all-downhill day that climbed 7,100 feet.

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Kerbs was the first to pop. Day two. It was an old knee injury flaring up, he said--which may have been true. The record will show, however, that the knee flared up just as we were beginning the long climb to Utah's Powell Point (elevation 10,188 feet)--a 3,000-foot ascent on a loose-gravel jeep road that features more wearisome twists and turns than an M. Night Shyamalan film. As Kerbs settled into shotgun in the support van and cracked a can of Old Chub, content to let the truth of his knee ailment be sorted out among God, himself and his HMO, he said, "This climb right here, it's a--" and unleashed a few choice profanities.

The attrition rate picked up on day three. Both Gene, the mountain bike instructor who had passed the morning by babbling about chronic calorie deficits even though the trailer was overloaded with food, and Abbey, who'd spent the entire lunch break looking like she was trying to ward off a coma, were in the van by midafternoon.

Long Gone Don conceded defeat a few miles west of Devil's Backbone Bridge. That was a stunner. The hyper-fit adventure racer pulled up to the van at the top of one of the day's countless multihundred-foot climbs, yanked out his techno-blaring earbuds and barked, "How many more hills?" When Vinnie gave him the straight answer--damned if he knew--Long Gone dismounted, cut loose a farmer blow and said, "I'm done."

Nate was next. When the solace of the four Advil he'd taken that morning burned off, he climbed into the van, saying this might have been the toughest day of riding of his life. Willy packed it in after a local sheriff chastised him for clinging to the van's passenger-side mirror heading up the day's 947th hill. I'd already capitulated, done in by an unshakeable altitude headache.

That left Ariel, the cross-country pro. When the van finally caught up to him, at the end of a road called Hell's Backbone, he was sitting alone on his mountain bike in the high-desert dusk, 69 miles and 7,143 vertical feet of climbing behind him. That's when Vinnie announced that the map scales must have been a little off, because we were still 15 miles short of camp. This would have been heartbreaking news, except for the fact that we were already immune to calamity; Vinnie had begun the morning--the third of a five-day, 245-mile exploratory epic across southern Utah--by telling us the ride would be mostly downhill.

For all this, I absolve Vinnie of blame. We knew what we'd signed on for when we'd met in Springdale, Utah, three days earlier. We'd been warned clearly and early that we'd been invited to a fantasy. Vinnie's ride was nothing but a vision.

Vince Bynan lives in southern Utah. Heavy-lidded, buzz-cut and lean at 38 years old, he epitomizes the self-made, outdoors-loving Western dude--someone with ambition to burn who ­simultaneously conveys the impression that he might not bother hauling himself out of bed every day if there weren't a killer ride waiting for him. And he spends a lot of time looking for those killer rides on maps, as a result of owning Summit Adventure Company, which has its office in Park City. Take out any map of Utah, look to the southern half, and you'll immediately understand how Vinnie got himself fixated on this adventure. That's red-rock country down there, with its jumble of cliffs, hoodoos, arches and layer-cake buttes. The names of the parks are straight out of the pickup-truck-commercial hall of fame: Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Glen Canyon, Box-Death Hollow Wilderness.

Now, look a little closer. All those squiggly little lines are jeep tracks and forest roads, most too out-there and rattletrap for RVs, but just about right for mountain bikes. It's easy enough for your finger to link them together if you start tracing from the rock-strewn and wind-whipped summit of Brian Head (elevation 11,307 feet), then over a trio of massive plateaus--Markagunt, ­Paunsaugunt and Aquarius--and finally down through the desert's otherworldly splendor, all the way to Bullfrog Marina, on the fast-receding shores of Lake Powell (elevation 3,700 feet).

To be seduced by the urge to link two points on a map is merely to be human, for this is surely one of our most elemental and enduring instincts. Noble examples abound: In the 14th century, the literary giant Petrarch found a way to the top of France's Mont Ventoux simply to check out the view and, when a few of his colleagues decided not to venture up, he accused them of frigida incuriositas (a cold lack of curiosity). In an iconic piece of modern travel literature, Blue Highways, the author, William Least Heat-Moon, skips interstates in favor of tiny backroads, equating his personal discovery of the little-noticed route to something like enlightenment. Discovering how to get from point to point leads to other, more important discoveries. Or so we believe.

Of course, Vinnie was just trying to create a new route to ­attract more customers. Yet when his e-mail calling for guinea pigs to research the route reached me via a mutual friend, I opened my Rand McNally to Utah and felt the same primitive surge that must have driven Petrarch upward. Vinnie's e-mail was fuzzy on facts, which only sharpened my interest: "Vertical gain: 15,000 feet (perhaps more). Length: 250 miles (approximate). Technical difficulty: cushy all-weather roads; eyeball-rattling, washboard doubletrack…easy climbs, tough climbs, insane climbs and more.…"